KoBold Metals announced that it will begin drilling for critical minerals in Greenland.

The startup mineral exploration company uses artificial intelligence and artificial learning to search for raw materials including nickel, cobalt and other critical minerals. The company is backed in part by billionaires including Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates.

Last year KoBold secured a 51 percent stake in the Disko-Nuussuaq project on Greenland’s west coast, which is operated by London-listed Bluejay Mining.

The joint venture will use drones to make a high-resolution magnetic survey of the area and plans to drill a total of 3,000 meters this year to depths of between 150 and 400 meters where the metals are located.

“The objective is to target massive nickel, copper, cobalt and platinum group metals,” Bluejay Mining Chief Executive Bo Steensgaard told Reuters.

Prices for nickel, used in stainless steel and electric vehicle batteries, more than doubled earlier this month in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which sparked Western sanctions against Moscow. Russia supplies about 10 per cent of the world’s nickel needs.

“The recent unfortunate geopolitical developments clearly show that the Western world needs new deposits of these critical metals,” Steensgaard said.

KoBold is a privately-held company whose principal investors include Breakthrough Energy Ventures, a climate and technology fund backed by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, Bloomberg founder Michael Bloomberg, and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

“Fully electrifying the global economy is our generation’s greatest challenge,” said KoBold CEO Kurt House.

“To accomplish that lofty goal we must accelerate our efforts to find the key materials for the electric vehicle revolution,” he said.

Last month, KoBold raised $192.5-million that will be used to discover critical materials.